The Plays of W.B. Yeats
Subtitle: Yeats and the Dancer
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: May 1995
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 370
ISBN-13: 9780312120474
Subjects: Yeats, W.B. (William Butler), 1865-1939; Dance in literature; Dancers in literature; History and criticism; Irish authors; Verse drama, English; Literary Criticism
First sentence: Before embarking on the principal concern of this chapter, an examination of versions of the legend of Salome which emerged after Heinrich Heine's publication of Atta Troll in 1841, reached a climax in the 1890s and continued, in a transformed manner, in the works of W.B. Yeats, echoing even in the last plays of 1935 and 1939, I shall first discuss the figure of the dancer as a concept of great significance to the movement of Symbolisme-Decadence and why she so captivated the fin-de-siecle consciousness of writers, painters and musicians.
Description: The Plays of W. B. Yeats: Yeats and the Dancer investigates Yeats's experiments with the media of language and dance. He was at one with other artists of the 1890s in his fascination with the biblical dancer Salome, an obsession which lasted until the end of his life, as his final plays reveal. His discovery of things Japanese, particularly 'Noh' theatre with its central dance, also influenced his own dramatic writing.

Yeats's preoccupation with the solo dancer, principally female, is set in the context of the work of dancers who were his contemporaries - Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Maud Allan - and he was greatly impressed by the arrival of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in London. Yeats was not alone in believing that language on occasion should give way to movement for the subtler expression of emotion, so the book concludes with a discussion of the dance-as-meaning debate still current today.